How to tell if news sources are reliable

David Brock knows about right-wing political smears because he once was involved in them. In the 1990s he launched twisted and often unsubstantiated attacks, first on Anita Hill and later on President Bill Clinton. Brock grew to doubt and eventually to despise those tactics, so he formed Media Matters to expose and to debunk them.

Brock in his recent book "Killing the Messenger" called the tactic "scandal laundering." He wrote, "Just as the mob uses a series of front businesses like dry cleaners and olive oil importers to turn dirty money into clean money, Republican operatives use friendly right-wing outlets — from book publishers to bloggers — to push false allegations into the mainstream, and to give them the patina of truth."

The path is well worn from places like the Drudge Report to intermediaries like Sean Hannity to more respectable media feeling obliged to ask about dubiously sourced claims. Now scandal laundering is supplemented by disinformation going directly to readers via conspiracy-crazed sites like WorldNetDaily, or Alex Jones' Infowars, or Glenn Beck's The Blaze.

It was bad enough when scandal laundering and malicious falsehoods occurred around a presidential campaign, but now we have these occurring within a presidential campaign. That's because Stephen Bannon of Breitbart now is chief executive of the Donald Trump presidential bid.

Sarah Posner, writing for Mother Jones, put it well. "By bringing on Stephen Bannon," she declared, "Trump was signaling a wholehearted embrace of the 'alt-right,' a once-motley assemblage of anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, ethno-nationalistic provocateurs who have coalesced behind Trump and curried the GOP nominee's favor on social media. In short, Trump has embraced the core readership of Breitbart News."

Ben Shapiro, who was an editor-at-large for Breitbart for four years, recently penned an article in The Daily Wire largely agreeing with Posner's summation. Shapiro bashed Bannon and lamented the degradation of site commentary "into a cesspool for white supremacist mememakers."

Snopes.com has called the website "notoriously unreliable." Factcheck.org has several articles dissecting and disputing Breitbart claims. A keyword search on Politifact for Breitbart will yield a dozen "Pants on Fire" evaluations for Breitbart statements or politicians quoting the site.

CNN media critic and "Reliable Sources" host Brian Stelter last month was asked about the bogus assertions of problems with Hillary Clinton's health. "That's the kind of conspiracy theory that starts in what I would call the fever swamps of the right-wing," he said. "It bubbles up on Twitter and Facebook, and on sites like Breitbart, eventually reaches Sean Hannity, and then reaches Donald Trump. And we're going to see more of those. I mean it's only August. I can't imagine what they'll be saying by October."

So, perhaps we need a consumer checklist for reliability of news sources. Here are some suggestions expressed as questions about those sources:

n Does it run prominent corrections?

n Does it have an editorial chain or other fact checking?

n How has it fared on neutral and established fact-checking sites like FactCheck, Politifact and Snopes?

n Does it have an in-house critic, reader representative or ombudsman?

n Has it repeated demonstrably untrue statements even after those statements have been discredited?